Election Season

A sci-fi short story on the subtleties of media & democracy

Rain glowing like acid in front of neon streetlights. Wet streets gleaming against the dripping city night. Jade on the curb, head hanging, blond hair turned to mud in the rain. Neo-music buzzing behind her from the club. Looks up into the singing rain with the weight of the world on her spine.

"This is how it ends," she says.

The Watcher stands beside her, trenchcoat drawn up to a shuttered collar. Gloved hands in deep pockets. A round hat turns his face into shadow. "Not having enough money to drink ka'kazaa all night long isn't the end. Pissing your family off again. Now that’s the end. Come on." Gloved hand reaches out for hers, waits in the air, stiff in the spitting breeze. She doesn't look up. She waits. Locks her hand with his. The Watcher brings her to her feet.

He waves a cab from the electric line. It sizzles through the rain to them, scans their faces with a single burst of white light. The door opens. Jade staggers into the cab, the door closes and the vehicle hisses away. His coat rustles in the breeze left from the cab, hands back in his pockets. Five seconds later, media drones swarm the air around the club in a bee-like buzz of propellors. He dims his glasses as the media bots bleach the night capturing video and photo for various livestreams. He hears the playback of the AI reporters.

The media bots whirr and vibrate. Compartments clank open and the bots jab small microphones at him. The tincan voices of their remote journo-pilots come through speakers of various quality.

"Jade Swendal came by here just now, didn't she, sir?"

“Was she mess like always? For NewsTube 24.”

"Excuse me, did you see Jade Swendal sitting on the curb? Could you believe what happened?"

“We’ve already compiled a collage of her worst moments. Any media to add?”

He waits for the expensive drone to smash through cheaper ones. A rickety overseas correspondent bot is decapitated by the fancier propellor blade and goes beeping frantically down into the gutter with a crunch.

"I have four eyewitnesses," an authoritative voice says from the speaker. "I need, in your words, for you to contribute to this case." The lawyer bot is the worst, most dangerous of the pack. He assumes the others have already buzzed into the club looking for evidence of wrongdoing while automatically registering potential chargeable offenses. A case will be drawn, lawyers versus lawyers versus algorithms. A result will be reached, put into the CaseFeed of One Store’s Local Interest app. Will be big, but not too big. People aren't interested in CaseFeed anymore. Hundreds, thousands of cases a day are opened and closed but nothing important seems to change.

He clears his throat and the pack of whirring bots goes silent.

"Fuck off," the Watcher says.

Waves at the cab line. The light blinks, the cab comes towards him. He steps into it. Behind him, the bots all withdraw their microphones in disappointment.

*

Jade tries to make her own ka'kazaa in the kitchen. Grabs a blender, caffeine pills, vodka, 200-Level Sunshine K mix, a pint of coconut milk. Just the right amount, then a little more. Presses the button. Stares at the shell of her reflection in the dark kitchen window. Rain dizzies the lights of sparkling cablines, the stars of apartment complexes.

Footsteps.

"Jade?" Her mother with a gray-blond ponytail. Holding a pink robe closed. Jade tries to cover the blender with her back.

"What are you doing up." Jade asks it like an accusation. She knows now it’s easy to scare her mother away.

"I heard the door," her mother explains, already backing away.

"I got home late from Lab."

"Okay." The mother puts her free hand up in the air. To demonstrate that she means no harm.

Jade’s smile is a snake as she watches her mother turn back through the doorway, up the stairs to fall backwards into bed with a sigh that blows hopeless and heavy. Jade drinks the entire blender of ka'kaza.

The Watcher kicks open the apartment door and grabs her wrist. "What the fuck are you doing?"

"I'm home now," Jade says, indecisive with defiance and fear. Staring into the sightless black shades that cover his eyes and the digital shadows that pixelate his face. "No media here."

"In front of the window?" he asks, ripping down the shade. He gestures at the two other doors. "Two neighbors asleep steps away. In the common kitchen?" He swells with rage and Jade backs into the sink. With a trembling hand, she puts the blender in the sink. Transitions into transcendence as the twisting drill of Ka'kaza spirals through her brain coming from the base of the neck up.

"Damn it," The Watcher says, catching her as she falls. Through the doorway, up the private staircase, drops her into her bed. Falls asleep seated in a chair facing the bed. The chair has been there since election preseason started.

*

He calls Senatorial candidate Frasier the next morning, to tell him that his sister's husband's sister's daughter was caught on the curb of the club, vomiting yellow from ka’kazaa withdrawals.

"Well what the shit. I really wonder why we don't lock her up with the stuff. Would keep her happy and me, us, all of us, too. You'd be unemployed, though, you know?"

“Always business for Watchers.” He stares down into the crystal clear projection of Frasier’s face, casting it from his WristBox.

"What'd they get, huh? What did the vultures find this time?"

"The bouncer and the club owner now have lawyers. Some law bots accused them of, what, uh...."

"Endangering an Electoral? Force-feeding a seventeen year-old ka'kaza?"

"Ka'kaza is legal at 16 now," he says.

"When the fuck did that happen. You know.” Three and a half unintelligible notes sputtered from the corner of his mouth. “Market W isn't sponsoring me for this shit, you know. They want results, not the face of some fuck-up of a removed niece on the World Network. That doesn't look good on their product reports and it certainly won’t help the campaign. You know?" The call-cast goes blank.

He puts the clasp over the WristBox and looks out the window. The pale daylight dulls the rotating ads on the virtual billboards floating like clouds through the sky. A grainy picture of Jade sitting on the curb with her head in her hands appears. An unflattering image of Senatorial candidate Frasier is layered on top of the screen. The rotten apple doesn't fall far from the family tree, the billboard claims in a hellish crimson font as it floats by the window. Frasier’s opponent Scott McCarfee's beaming face replaces the inferno. A red and a green bar glow beside the face, showing that the city’s population supports McCarfee by a healthy margin. The numbers are probably made up, but no one is interested in that anymore. Perhaps there is an asterisk hanging from the chart, microscopic beside the percentage signs, stating that these numbers are from a fifty-person sample size, including mostly the McCarfee campaigners and their immediate families.

The Watcher chuckles to himself.

"What are you laughing about?" Jade groans, sliding up against the headboard and squinting in the distant dust of sunlight. He points at another billboard with her face on it as the ad cloud transitions.

"Motherfucker," she says. She taps her WristBox to project into the OmniScreen above her bureau.

"....race will begin in three months, evidence already against Frasier. Photos here, here. Show a very young Jade on the curb. Almost obviously addicted to ka'kazaa. Reports given by ex-therapist. ka'kazaa dependency." This last part, said again in the melodic chanting of News Speak. "Jade, of Senatorial hopeful Frasier, has ka'kazaa dependency." The pictures again, with new ones already uploaded behind the reporter. "Here, Jade, on the curb, with her Watcher."

Jade takes a selfie where she is looking distant and moody staring out the window and updates her World account, telling her WristBox: "Seriously misunderstood by reporters. Just wanted to see friends at the club, got blown off, real depressed." Back to the News. In two minutes, this entry is floating around behind the reporter. "News from Jade, says just waiting for friends, what do lawyers have to say about it? Bouncer and bartender, witnesses. Also being prosecuted for not testifying against...."

"Turn that off," the Watcher says. "It's time for school."

*

At school, Jade sits in front of the Teach-Matic Board, retypes, mouthes the lessons aloud with the other students. Jade is in Class Level IV, a level below her normal age group, but this is because she gets so impatient with the Student Input Board (SIP) that, by the end of each day, she jabs random answers into it. Many other students do the same. They end school, age eighteen, in Class Level IV, becoming invalid for application at Writer, Lawyer, Accountant, Advertiser, Marketer School. Jade thinks she doesn't care about this, even though her Predictive Elementary Scores already disqualified her from STEM School. This will most likely funnel her to a bot repair shop or lunar resettlement.

Three ‘o’clock. The Teach-Matic Board shuts down with an anticlimactic blip. Jade slips down the hallway, looking over her shoulder, looking around corners, gallops down the stairs, through the Delivery Exit, out into the humid air, foggy with spring sunlight. Past cab stops, Full Screen Stalls. The cab lines are sparse during the afternoon, cabs only occasionally whining by. Jade wears large sunglasses and a hat to protect herself from patrolling media bots. Down one of the damp alleys, where the Trash Chute and the Water Converter Lines leak, Jade puts her palms to her eyes and tries to keep from crying. Even from here, the rush hour ad cloud is forming. She sees a billboard overhead, radiating with her previously secret World Account messages. She wonders which friend sold them to the News Merchants. She hasn’t been able to see anyone but her mother since the election preseason began.

All around her, she can hear the City Screens bellowing with candidate speeches. She can’t tell whether Frasier or McCarfee is speaking. Underneath this rumbling, the cabs buzz through the city like mosquitoes. Jade hears her name over and over again, spilling from strange mouths. She splashes deeper into the alley but can still faintly, hear a reporter reading a love message she sent to a boy when she was in Class Level II, just fourteen. The reporter reads the note with disgust.

She wonders why the reporters never see the correlation between her ka’kazaa consumption and Senatorial Candidate Frasier’s decision to run for Senator. She wonders why they don’t try and find out why she was sitting alone, in the rain, outside a club. The Watcher said that most of the reporters are AI. Nothing about the media is human, it’s all scripted from the data that the bots collect. That’s what he says. But that doesn’t make her feel better. Her data is all of her world, as far as Jade can tell.

No one even understands her daily life of being a data target but her shadow of a Watcher. Friends are wary, afraid of becoming secondary data targets for a larger Collect and Report Algorithm. The pricess to help train the C&R Algorithms are too good to resist. The only updates she sees from her old friends now are the times they claim something about her had been rotten from the start, then sell party pictures of her or World messages to the highest bid on the Automated News Merchant Network.

When she finally lifts her palms from her eyes, the Watcher is looking down at her. He takes off his glasses. She is startled into indignation, especially when she sees the flat, black wells of his unsympathetic eyes. He sees the curling of her lip and puts one hand on her shoulder. “You’ll be okay,” he says, fumbling with sympathy like it’s slippery and unfamiliar.

She curls back into her shell. “Fuck you.”

His hand wilts away. “You want me to suspend your school ID for the next few months or do you want me in the classroom?"

She double-blinks. “What?”

He puts his glasses back over his eyes. “You are supposed to report directly to me, outside the School’s public entrance, every day after school.” His wide-brim hat casts AutoFade and soon his face is nothing but the old familiar blur. “You failed. What's it gonna be? No school or a school chaperone?"

“Fuck you!” she shrieks.

Shoulders him aside, starts running. The City Screens still boom with election updates, every so often saying her name with an inflated sense of disgust. Jade. She turns into a Residence Street until reaching a park with a few square feet of turf and a tree and a rosebush. Water trickles around the park’s designated border in grooves. A black bench sits underneath the shade of the tree.

She is openly weeping and puts her head against the tree and for a second believes she can take it all away, become a bigger part of nature to escape the shrinking machine of her life. Something snaps around her wrist and she is tugged off the bench. The Watcher has latched her with a Cuff Bracelet.

“Ready to go back to your house and sit there for the rest of the night?” he asks. “It will give you time to decide about school tomorrow.”

She sniffs and walks with him, having no choice, not even in her answers.

Come back next Sunday for the second and final part of “Election Season,” part of Litverse’s new Sunday Sci-Fi Shorts Collection.